Our viands

Many people besides Frederick of Prussia have found melons indigestible in our colder climes. In truth, they are best suited to hot climates and hot weather, and will be sure to disagree in cold seasons ; and so well was this 'TWIXT FRUIT AND VEGETABLE 209 understood formerly, that melons were never sent to table without an accompaniment of ground ginger. Nowadays people risk indigestion, and eat them with sugar only, or sometimes with pepper and salt. Melons of some kind have of late become almost as abundant in our streets as in those of the sunny South, for they are imported by thousands from Spain — great green-looking things called water-melons, but not really so, and of very good flavour when ripe — slices being now sold in the streets at a halfpenny, or even less, so that it is no longer an uncommon sight to see our ragged urchins munching their slice of melon, like Murillo's little Spanish boys. It is not easy to say whether the cucumber should be classed as a fruit or a vegetable ; it stands upon the border- land, and may be eaten as either, but whether fresh, stewed, or pickled, is a very delicious accompaniment to many savoury dishes, and especially salads j and what would those pleasant cooling summer beverages, claret and champagne cup, be, without a slice or two of cucumber floating on the top ? Cucumbers, like melons, have become so much more plentiful of late, that they may be purchased all the year round for a few pence, being cultivated largely in green- houses, and, in the summer, in the open air. ' A lodge in a garden of cucumbers' will come to the mind in writing of them. Here we have not to put up sheds to safeguard them from foxes and jackals, as in Syria, but the market gardener has to watch against human prowlers, ever on the alert to fill their own pockets at the expense of their neigh- bours ; for a crop of cucumbers — the plants trained under glass in greenhouses like vines, the fruit hanging from them by hundreds, straight, and often half a yard in length — if 210 OUR VIANDS they can be brought forward early enough in the spring, is worth a very large sum, but they diminish rapidly in value as the season advances. Pumpkins and vegetable marrows, which belong to the same tribe as the melon and the cucumber, are certainly vegetables, not being eaten in the raw state. As vegetables they are much more esteemed abroad than in England, although the vegetable marrow has grown greatly in favour of late years, but the pumpkin — so much used on the Continent, in America, and in our Colonies — is still utterly rejected by our peasantry, as fit only for pigs. In vain do philanthropists show how easily it is grown, and how it may be stored for winter use. Hodge will have none of it. Nevertheless, of late pumpkin in slices has been sold at the greengrocers for soups, etc., during the winter, and appears to meet with a ready sale, so that perhaps in time the prejudice may be overcome. Singularly enough, it would seem that the pumpkin was very early introduced into England, and was then known as the melon, the melon itself being called musk melon. The cucumber, too, is said to have been commonly grown in England in the reign of Edward III., but was afterwards neglected and disused until the reign of Henry VIII., and not generally cultivated till the middle of the seventeenth century.